See tiny organisms on show in microscopic video competition

Nikon’s annual Small World In Motion competition is open to anyone around the world with an interest in film or time-lapse photography through a microscope.

This year’s winning video was magnified to 100 times in size, and featured tiny hair-like structures, called cilia, in the airways of a child with a rare genetic disease.

It was submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, who used a series of complicated light waves to illuminate different parts of the sample in colour.

Runners up in the competition included videos of a roundworm encountering a single-celled organism and microscopic jellyfish larvae suspended in droplets of water. Clips of bioluminescent algae and a tiny sea slug were among the highly commended.